2018 Fiction + Essay Contest Winners!

Sonora Review is proud to announce the winners of our 2018 Fiction and Essay contests. Each winner will receive $1000 and publication in SR Issue 74, themed The Future, forthcoming this summer. The editors would like to thank all contestants for sharing their work with us as well as the judges for their generosity of time and spirit.

Note: We are still in the process of deciding on the winner of the Poetry contest. We will update this post and make another announcement via social media once the results are in.

2018 Fiction Prize

Winner: “shift+delete” by Silvia Park

Judge Charles Yu:
“shift+delete” stood out for its voice, and the boldness of its ideas. From an intriguing conceit, the story adds layers of inventive detail and nuance to its characters, building to moments of real emotion. I would be interested to see what the writer goes on to create in the future.”

2018 Essay Prize

Winner: “The Imagined Homeland” by May-lee Chai

Judge Rubén Martínez:
“This essay is a salve upon the wound of the Trumpian moment we endure. The narrator is a mixed-race woman telling of multiple homelands: material, psychic and generational geographies bounded by power and prejudice, her own body a battlefield delimited by many borders. This is a powerful, almost clinically detached examination of her subjectivity in the vein of an American confessional informed by the much larger world that many Americans willfully ignore or can only barely apprehend. There is a scene where the narrator-daughter regards her parents while they sleep – her elderly, vulnerable, dying parents — that took my breath away for the tender beauty of its telling. This piece is a powerful embodiment of the feminist dictum ‘the personal is political,’ and brings us closer to the home so many of us have imagined, longed for, and deserve.”

About the winners:

Silvia Park grew up in South Korea. She is a George R.R. Martin scholarship recipient from the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and an MFA candidate at NYU.

May-lee Chai is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction and one book-length translation from Chinese to English of the 1934 Autobiography of Ba Jin. Her short prose has appeared in Catapult, The Offing, Glimmer Train, The Rumpus, Missouri Review, North American Review, ZYZZYVA, Seventeen, San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Christian Science Monitor, and Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, among other publications. She is the past recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Prose.